The Computer Science Technical Report (CS-TR) Project: Considerations from the Library Perspective.

In 1992 the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded a three year grant to investigate the questions related to large-scale, distributed, digital libraries. The award focused research on Computer Science Technical Reports (CS-TR) and was granted to the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) and five research universities. The ensuing collaborative research has focused on a broad spectrum of technical, social, and legal issues, and has encompassed all aspects of a very large, heterogeneous distributed digital library environment: acquisition, storage, organization, search, retrieval, display, use and intellectual property. The initial corpus of this digital library is a coherent digital collection of CS-TRs created at the five participating universities: Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, MIT, Stanford, and the University of California at Berkeley. The Corporation for National Research Initiatives serves as a collaborator and agent for the project. This technical report summarizes the accomplishments and collaborative efforts of the CS-TR project from a librarian''s perspective; to do this we address the following questions: 1. Why do librarians and computer scientists make good research partners? 2. What has been learned? 3. What new questions have been articulated? 4. How can the accomplishments be moved into a service environment? 5. What actions and activities might follow from this effort?